Lost in Suburbia: The itsy bitsy ginormous spider

When we started our house renovation, I was prepared for the dust, the mess, the inconvenience, the plumbing snafus and unexpected electrical issues.

What I was not prepared for were …

The spiders.

“Aaaugh,” I screamed from the bathroom, where nothing more than a towel separated me from certain death at the hands (legs) of a massive (tiny) man-eating house spider. At the sound of my blood-curdling cries, the contractor came pounding up the stairs to save my life.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded from the other side of the bathroom door.

“There is a MONSTER spider in here,” I bellowed. “I asked him nicely to leave but he refused.”

I heard chuckling from the other side. I was confident the contractor had never seen the likes of a spider this size in all his renovating days and thus could not appreciate the depths of my terror.

“How big is it?” he asked.

I peered down at the spider from my perch on top of the toilet. I knew the spider could climb up the toilet if he wanted, but I thought the extra time it took him to do so would allow me to leap to the sink in a last ditch attempt to save myself.

“At least … an inch!” I shouted. “It’s huge!”

More chuckling. “I think you’ll be OK. I’m going back to work,” he snorted. Clearly he had no idea how desperate this situation was. Forget the fact that he would be guilty of leaving the scene of a crime. But if I were to be consumed by this spider, there was no way my husband would pay the contractor to finish building my walk-in closet.

Lest you think I was overreacting, this was not the first monster spider I had encountered since construction began. There had literally been a swarm of spiders over the course of the week, no doubt disturbed from their monster spider lairs by the demolition in the house. And when I say swarm, I mean AT LEAST three.

Although my husband assured me that the spiders were helpful because they ate other insects, I begged to differ. I had seen pictures of spider bites on the Internet and they were usually on people who had formerly been alive. Nevermind that those were bites from spiders only found in the Australian Outback and on Easter Island. I’m sure there were plenty of undocumented deaths as a result of the bite of a common North American house spider. And when I say plenty, I mean at least one.

I was scared, of course. But I was also annoyed. I had spoken with a half-dozen friends who had lived through house renovations, and while many had warned me of appliance delivery delays, tile shortages and various other construction nightmares, not ONE of them had alerted me to the fact that I would be opening up Pandora’s box of arachnids.

Realizing I was on my own, I summoned up all my courage, leapt over the spider, and hit the ground running out of the bathroom. I quickly shut the door, threw on some clothes and went to find the contractor.

“You’ll be relieved to know that I handled the spider situation myself,” I announced.

“Great,” he said. “So I guess that means you won’t have any problem with the mice.”

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